Growing up, I often heard that ‘time is the most important resource’ and other kinds of platitudes like that. I was never sure what it really meant but now that I work in a time-intensive field and have so many other obligations and demands, I know that to be the case. Time, and especially how one handles one's time, is critical to living well and being well.
But personal time managment in 2023 is a lot different than it used to be in 1970. Today, I want to talk about how to manage your time as a modern (privileged) citizen of the world. I will present 3 new ideas that help explain the scope of the problem and 3 helpful heuristics for time managment in everyday life.
1. The currency of the modern world is entertainment.
Entertainment has gone vertical and there are just so many more ways to spend your time today than there used to be. There is a lot more demand on our time and the supply has changed just marginally in the western world (life expectancy gains and added efficiency in daily living). Someone in 1960 could easily tell when they were wasting time back in the day and often opted to take part in leisure instead. The classification of these types of activities is a lot less clear today. Is reading this blog a form of entertainment? What about podcasts? Is that a waste of time? Is that entertainment? Is it building value? What value are you building really? How many people make money in these endeavors? How many people remember what they listen to daily?
No matter how you look at it, because of modern telecommunications technologies, entertainment has a much broader definition in 2022. It is hard to know exactly when you start wasting time, or when you stop learning, or growing or self-improving or whatever the case may be. Without clear guidelines, monetary feedback, or decision points, it leaves us these undifferentiated activities like scrolling youtube self-improvement channels or listening to finance podcasts where you do some learning, some connecting with people but mostly entertainment due to the agency problem. Learning takes repetition, learning takes active engagement, reading and watching content is not learning because it is all passive.
Another reason entertainment has exploded in the western world is the invention of new ways to waste time such as fantasy sports (gambling), online gaming, and live shows (twitter spaces, clubhouse, etc) where most people lose both time and money and gain extraordinarily little in the way of relationships and new experiences. In mathematical terms, it takes about 2 hours playing fantasy football per week for one new positive experience (winning your game on sunday), considering most people lose games and it is a zero-sum game, fantasy betting is a net negative in both the time and money category.
In one of my favorite animes Jujutsu Kaisen, “domain expansion” is the idea that characters who are strong enough can capture space time and create a separate domain or a physical place separate from known reality. In this new space, they can overpower their opponents because they get to make all the rules (flow of time, climate etc).
Remembering that our goal as humans is more positive valence, endless entertainment creates an expanded domain where we get trapped and are unable to achieve our goals. If you find yourself in someone’s domain, you need to realize what the hidden costs are and get out because there are more efficient ways to generate the rewards you are obtaining. Your reality is your domain, other domains outside of your reality (fantasy worlds, pseudonymous accounts, infinite scrolling, youtube etc) should all be heavily scrutinized for their return on your time invested.
The only caveat to this idea here is that every now and then, you may passively come across an idea in niche content x (e.g veganism), at the right time and the right place for you and it changes the course of your trajectory and decision making in the short-term (i.e. you chose to go vegan). This does happen, but it is exceedingly rare and most people make changes for a short while and revert to their mean in a few months once they disengage from niche content x or encounter second-order effects that overcome their initial drive/motivation (dopamine decay). I have been guilty of this myself and have gone through major life swings at times, all very unsustainable, except a select few. The decisive factor here was how well-aligned with my underlying subconscious tendencies and the degree of immersion I could commit. My personal decision point is about 2400 hours (one hundred full days). Anything short of full immersion for 2400 hours is simply not enough to sustainably learn or change, so a simple heuristic is this
If you are not able/willing to fully immerse yourself, you are being entertained.
In 2022, everybody is distracted, entertainment has gone parabolic, higher than it used to be back in the day and only getting higher (virtual worlds, AI, politics, culture wars etc). It’s all happening, and none of it matters to your long-term wellbeing.
2. All Personal Time should be converted to dollar amounts.
This is an idea inspired from this TED talk so I will just embed it (it’s worth your time I promise ;))
Credit to Brian Nelson-Palmer and the youtube algortithm.
TLDW: Assign a dollar amount to your free time (outside of work and other things to survive). Prioritize the things that matter to you, imo should be new experiences and relationships (but that’s just me)! For all other things, ask yourself if you would be comfortable spending (Time (hrs) X dollar amount) on this.
e.g: If you spend 4 hours on twitter every day and have a personal time quotient of $25/hr; are you comfortable with the tradeoff of $100 every day for the opportunity to browse twitter?
Visualize getting a speeding ticket of 100$ at the end of each day, that is what’s happening. All for the sake of mostly entertainment. My heuristic here is,
Life is limited, all time is costly.
3. Being available for experiences and relationships is the key to a well-lived life.
This claim is a bit more subjective and dependent on the individual, but when older people and people near the end of their life are surveyed, this is what you consistently find. At present, more people report being lonely and isolated than ever before, two things that are diametrically opposed to what I believe to be necessary for wellbeing.
Everyone has theories as to why this is happening, some say it's an effect of the global pandemic and increased reliance on technology. Some say it's young people not being as risk averse, not going out. My simple theory for this, as I have laid out here, is the explosion of entertainment (time demand) making it harder for us to connect with others. We just don't have the time anymore.
For us to have more of the things that we would like to see in our lives, we need an honest inventory of the amount of entertainment that is in our lives. Only then can we become truly available, truly present to engage with the real world, with other humans in the messy ways that reality affords us. Only then can we open to new experiences and start to be well in a way that is sustainable and leaves a mark on those we touch.
My last heuristic for you is as follows,
The more entertained you are, the poorer your life becomes.